Project- Communications with Nature

For my final year project at university I will be exploring how nature communicates within its own community and how humans can tap into that causing us to be able to communicate with nature. I personally feel in an idyllic world we could communicate with nature to understand it better in order to work with nature to halt climate change and global warming.

To start this project I felt I had to understand nature myself better, how they communicate and the systems that runs amongst the trees and plants. For my research I watched 'Fantastic Fungi on Netflix, read books on this topic and watched talks. I found the person to most influence my research for this was Paul Stamets, author and mycologist. This really took my project off as I learned that at the core of the communications that go on within nature start with fungi and continue through Mycelium. I learned How vital Mycelium is for essentially all life on earth. It Passes nutrients from one plant to another using electrical pulses, it is also sentient like animals and humans which amazes me itself. Essentially the existence and function of mycelium on our planet fascinated me so much that that's where my project took off from.

From simply starting artist research at Beatrix Potter's delicately beautiful fungi studies, I Stretched out to explore forms of communication that is familiar to us. I thought of light and sound.

To look into how I could portray communication with light I researched artists Bruce Munro and Barry Underwood. Both of these I really enjoyed their unique use of light. I especially was intrigued with Munro's cabling effect over large expanses of land. His use of fiber optic cable gave a stunning effect on the land, which for me resonated mycelium. I thought through cable lighting I could symbolize mycelium and its electrical pulses of communication.

[Beatrix Potter - Mushroom study]

[Bruce Munro - Field of Light]

From here I also wanted to look into the use of sound in nature and communication. For us, sound is primarily used as language for communication, however music is also vastly used as a form of communication. Music can be used to communicate emotions, create specific atmospheres and indicate certain events. As sound is more recognizable as communication to the subconscious I started researching. I looked at the work of Chris Watson, a sound recordist. I was interested by his recordings as he records the sounds of nature in intriguing locations. This is something I would like to experiment with.

I came across the artwork of Serena Korda and fell in love with her mushroom bells hung in a tree. Her ceramic mushroom bells inspire me. The sound that comes from ceramic can be a beautiful twinkly sound and that caused by the wind blowing through the trees and the mushrooms would be a beautiful natural sound, with natural materials in a natural environment. the perfect combination for a symbolic communication with nature.